I don’t know if we each have a destiny, or if we’re all just floating around accidental-like on a breeze, but I, I think maybe it’s both. Maybe both is happening at the same time.

Very sad news today about Larry Hagman.
He came to our house a few years ago to be presenter on stage at a nearby music Festival.
In keeping with a recent “Biblical humor” post here, Larry was stoned most of the time he was here. He didn’t smoke the stuff, he made cookies and vacuum packed them. When customs officers at the airport would ask what they were, he would say, “those are my cookies, my grandmothers recipe, that’s all I ever eat for breakfast. Don’t you recognize me? I’m JR, do you want an autograph?”.
To cut a long story short, Larry fell over a cable walking onto stage the first night of the festival. He was sufficiently stoned not to be bothered by what was obviously a broken wrist and he continued presenting the show into the early hours. When we finally got him to hospital and they put a plaster on his wrist (see photo left), he said, “this is great, I can’t sign any more autographs this week!.”
In the end we bought him an ink pad and he would give a thumbprint instead of an autograph.
His wife Maj (also in photo) was very funny too during their visit here. She would say, “I only let Larry out on his pushbike now, but I’ve got the Ferrari.”
Larry would reply “but you never take the Ferrari out, it hasn’t been used for so long, the last time we looked at it there was a colony of mice living in the car!”

Very strange yesterday. We have a couple of Northern Lapwings that turned up in the garden. They came to the window and I saw them watching Dionne Warwick being interviewed on the telly. I had a memory of my encounter with Whitney Houston.
I was at the Fairmont in Dubai and coming back from a long day at the office, I went down to the pool for a swim. The sunset pool, pictured here on the right.
This beautiful girl down the other end of the pool with a little girl, no doubt her daughter, shouted very loudly “wow look at that handsome muscular man coming into the pool”.
It took a while for me to realize that she was talking about me. Obviously I had an admirer.
I sort of gently swam over in her direction, she was smiling at me invitingly.
At that point this large gorilla-like bodyguard guy arrived from no-where and looked at me as if I was swimming in the wrong direction and maybe turning around and swimming the other way would be a good idea.
And that is what I did.
“That’s Whitney Houston” someone muttered to me discretely as I dried off in the setting sun. She indeed had a concert in Dubai that same night.
Sad day today.

Please visit this petition website and sign and/or donate Defense Fund for Nick Abson. Fuel cell pioneer Nick is facing jail so it’s urgent.

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world. Not only shall we be able to cruise in space, but I’ll be hanged if I see any reason why some future generation shouldn’t walk off like a beetle with the world on its back, or give it another rotary motion so that every zone should receive in turn its due portion of heat and light.

Henry Brooks Adams
Letter to Charles Francis Adams Jr., London, 11 April 1862.

Incredible news.

Apparently I don’t snore anymore

My Grandmothers birthday today, God bless her soul.

This photo dates from March 1917 and was taken in Trindad, about nine months later my mother was born. Do we see that sparkle in her eye?

We are working on a photo exhibition at the museum in the Saint Vincent Botanical Gardens, actually the house where my mother was born (see here).

More information here coming soon.

After almost a years silence I’m back. These last 12 months have been terrible with
– health problems (I was almost unable to walk for nearly 4 months due to back problems)
– work problems (the film/TV business is governed more and more by Microsoft excel and there are no longer the “criteria” we had in the old days)
– building problems (my house in the Grenadines is taking on monetary proportions that I had not envisaged)
– money problems (why don’t people pay my bills on time anymore?)
– sentimental problems (with concise direct dialogue human beings can resolve, or at least discuss, their differences, when there is silence it’s like deaf people speaking to each other and misunderstanding makes it worse).

All this to say that over 10,000 pages of this blog are viewed every month and so someone out there is interested and cares.
So please come back here soon: the good things coming up are:
– we put the bonus DVD of THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER online, please go here and buy the box set with the movie: TheMoonAndTheSledgehammer.com
– the fuel cell project in Dordogne is about to start and we are negotiating with the Saint Vincent and the Grenadines government to bring clean waste-to-energy low cost electricity to the islands for nearly half the price they pay today
– our rigid airship is about to take off
– volume two of Denis Weldone’s time travel thriller is nearly finished (click here for volume one)
– some great new songs will appear here soon
– new recipes of course
– new category about healing, Shamanism and related topics
– and many other interesting things including more recipes, memorable restaurants, eco-architecture, heavy cult stuff, and lots more (maybe even some pornography!!).

Been going through my mothers scrap book, fascinating stuff

She was Miss Paramount sometime before the Second World War and appeared in some films produced by Adolph Zukor. The war disrupted her movie career and she subsequently lied about her age practically all her life, going to great lengths to destroy any evidence of her real year of birth. So the dates are uncertain, it must have been 1937 or 1938.

At some stage there was an exhibition in London and my Grand Father must have come over from Malaya to organise the Malayan Pavilion.

Here is one of the rather amusing newspaper cuttings that I found:
“Among the palm-nuts and pinapples of the Malayan Pavilion at the Exhibition will be found this young lady. She is Miss Rena Sands, of Richmond Surry. At 19 (?) her career has already been vivid enough – actress, model, mannequin, traveller. In films she played with Merle Oberon in “Over the Moon.” She was one of the exclusive band of Grosvenor House showgirls. When Adolf Zukor, movie czar, visited England, Rena Sands was chosen as Miss Parmount. Her father Mr W. N. Sands, also at the Pavilion, represents Malay. Rena had six years in that country, speaks the language, and, at the Information Desk, knows all the answers.”

Another cutting says:
“I took a friend just home from Malacca, into the Malayan Pavilion to sign the visitors’ book. Pretty Miss Sands, whose father is in charge of the Pavilion, said a few words in the Malay tongue. My friend replied.
The competition was too great for me, so I retired and left them to it, but not before I had noticed that Ivor Novello and Victor MacLagen had also discovered the most beautiful exhibit in the Malayan Court.”

Dany, from Saint Vincent (see here below) has introduced me to her homemade Rosemary hair lotion. You won’t believe this but hair is actually growing back on my bald patch, I don’t look like a monk anymore!!

Here is the recipe:
– Make tea with a lot of Rosemary, fresh if possible. Let it cool.
– add a little cider vinegar
– add a few drops of rosemary essential oil
– keep in the fridge and apply to your hair, a few drops at a time, two or three times a week

No posts for a while but my book has been greatly progressing and there are even some new songs on the way.

I was by the seaside actually, very nice it was too, swimming every day and, of course, cooking for the troops.

I little thought for Jimmy Vaughan whose presence and influence is greatly felt these. We re-released THE MOON AND THE SLEDGEHAMMER on DVD, you can buy a copy here on the film’s official website themoonandthesledgehammer.com. Only £16.99.

More recipes are on the way so come back here soon

Just a little thought for Ram Gopal the great Indian dancer. I first met him in London in the 1970s when I was distributing Indian films, and then years later in France I went to visit my friend Pascal Lamorisse (funnily enough the little boy in THE RED BALLOON) in Provence France and Ram answered the door with Claude Lamorisse, I couldn’t believe it at the time, we often laughed about how our paths were destined to cross. Throughout the 1980s we met in France with the Lamorisse family talking about dance and cinema. But in the early 90’s we lost touch again, he died in 2003 but I sometimes feel him close by, even today. A good profile-tribute can be found here

I been on my travels again: Paris, of course, but also Atlanta Georgia. The place is just like one huge suburb that never stops, the people are nice, the food copious and the coffee dreadful.
I encountered some interesting recipes. The young spinach leaf salad with bits of bacon and strawberries (yes the fruit) worked surprising well and the sweet potato fries were memorable.

To completely change the subject, we religiously followed the instructions in the magic stone book and regenerated our stones last night when there was the full moon. For those who haven’t read the magik stone saga click here.
Anyway there is a fucking lunar eclipse, the full moon sort of went brown (dirty planet earth getting in the way) and disappeared. I hope this does not have a negative effect on the stones which had been soaking in salt for a day and, according to the book, should be dried in the moonlight.

To completely change the subject once again, here is a slightly better photo of the rabbit recipe.

This coming week it looks like Milano and Venice and I have a super new laptop MacBook so I’ll be posting new recipes and recitals from Italy.

My other fan (the one in Leeds, England) submitted this contribution which deserves exposure and no comment. It’s never too late Neil and of course I remember.

You drink a heady literary wine, evoke an ocean poem of eating.

Leave the food at home honey, I say: Tell the finks to listen to the ocean instead!

Over by the sand dunes where you ran your fingers through my hair,
tenderly biting my nipples when we kissed,
I dis-composed the urban scheme transfixed by the beauty of your skin
and you filled a whole paragraph in my book on living.

Together we drank before stumbling for the train and listening to the “suits” in the smoke preaching their new world order to brutes.

Our hands tied together, blindfolded, looking for the jihadists
we ran together through anglo-american bullets.

For this?

It requires so little to call oneself poet. It just takes nerve.
My hair didn’t grow like this by just leaving it to it’s own devices.
I took action with the scissors. And the crew you mention call me a “queer”
Let them go fuck themselves.
I blow open my heart for no one, am loftier without thinking about it than they could ever be,
walking windy avenues for my friends and family, gulping the emptiness,
deliberating for ever on working versions of indigestible prose
too tired for meaning
I jam in clubs and the meats get nervous until I walk out.

See me in the Dark Wood any day. I read esoteric Chemistry at the University of Life.
When I’m not fixing my bike, or climbing mountains, I write songs without words celebrating consciousness with apricots

Standing on this precipice looking out to sea
the sky is my true index my theme the cosmos
my aim that One-ness you told me about.

Remember?

We had an earthquake, quite strange really, like driving the car off a steep curb but the whole house went “CLUNK!”. The funny thing was the animals in the roof and the cats and birds, they were all rushing/flitting around like mad for two of three seconds before the quake, as if they sensed it coming. No damage although some chimneys fell down near the epicentre where, apparently, the earth made a great rumbling noise.
My last earthquake was in Greece twenty years ago, I slept through the whole thing (or maybe we were just in the process of conceiving firstborn).
Night comes in
Like some cool river
I never knew
There’d be another day

The Paris meetings went badly, somehow everything gets complicated these days. Endless delay after endless delay, two steps forward costs three steps back.
So I got on the bus to Opera and a young guy at the front has some kind of heart attack or faint or whatever, he looked like drugs actually. Anyway the guy passes out so the bus driver stops, asks us all to get out, and calls an ambulance on his radio. The other passengers wait patiently for the next bus, but I walk.
Down some side streets, I love to follow my nose while generally going in the right direction.
A genteman ghost from the past wearing a wig (or was it a little angel with curly hair and flat dancing shoes?) leads me into a courtyard, and then another courtyard, and then through a tiny shop door.
It was like walking into a cave, or worse, like a fairground where you feels oppressed and bombarded with the noise of bumber cars, sirens, loud music, the smell of kebas and hot dogs, laughter and screams, gunshot.
But this was a different kind of bombardment: this shop sells stones, bits of rock, beautiful and strange artefacts that emit energies I had hardly dreamt of. I broke out in a sweat, my head was spinning, and then I saw a piece of Indian Amethyst…
Minérales do Brasil sold me the rock which, specialists claim, can transform negative waves into positive energy. I also bought a small black tourmaline stone to protect me from the pollution of our sad modern world.
The Magick has returned, now stronger than ever.

André called. The radio pollution is getting unbearable in his house. At first we thought it was the digital television signal coming off the mountains but the force of the waves is such that we suspect that they increased power the mobile phone antenna on the nearby autoroute.
I’m trying to get André here, it’s been too long since we met and we seem to help each other face up to the inside feeling of impending doom.For the first time we spoke about building a house. At least if we can contribute to helping the environnment, it may help or inspire others…who knows?
I received some pictures from a book. The pages scream out at me like those old books in Menton, the ones the Gestapo had tried to destroy, fortunately without success.

a world awaits me
my instinct believes
plunged in your eyes
your magic received
a knot that unites
none can undo
I had broken my life
and then again I found you

It all started with Jimmy, he used to carry around dried chilli peppers in a matchbox and eat them with everything. I recall once we went to a pizzeria in Dean Street or somewhere in the backstreets of Soho, and he was so upset because he had run out of chillies and the restaurant didn’t have any – we found a compromise in the form of a generous sprinkling of garlic. I paid the bill. The pizzas were excellent, the owner only spoke Italian and the tablecloths were red checkered like in the movies.

One day Jimmy’s cousin from Nigeria was in town and they spent the days cooking and talking with clicks and stange African words. The hot sticky okra was especially memorable.

But the real passion for this plant came when I went to the West Indies for the first time, it was like coming home. Memories of past lives flooded in and entities came to see me and pay their respects. Denis was there of course.

Jimmy is sometimes here with me. I helped his daughter once, she had gravely misuderstood him. He died in the aftermath of a stupid car accident in Burgundy, on the eve of his real comeback.

The chilli peppers have been omni-present ever since

More on chillies in future posts.

Vapour trails in the sky, Mountains seem so ever high, I think of you I don’t know why

All within a dream

Noughts and crosses up above, Is it lust is it love, Sometimes I’ve just had enough

All within a dream

       I saw the look upon your face, like the writing on the wall

       The shyness in your smile made the past seem somehow much more worthwhile

       And the sparkle in your eye, you just blew me way way sky high

Glancing left and looking right I wonder now if you just might be feeling just the same as me

All within a dream

Will you touch me, will you not? Right now I’d give all I’ve got to be sure what we feel inside

All within a dream

Our hands just brushed, our eyes were locked, I’m reeling still, feel shell-shocked. Coupe de foudre light just struck
All within a dream

Will you ask me, can I dare, can we admit what we share?

Blink an eye, the moment’s gone, wake up from a dream